Reims, Saint-Remi, plan of 11th-
century church (above) and present
plan (below). After Ravaux and
Deneux.
tance of Reims in this struggle is illustrated by the coronation of Charles VII at the
cathedral on July 17, 1429, fol-lowing a three-month march from Orléans led by Jeanne
d’Arc. Erasing doubts about Charles’s legitimacy, the ceremony provided a powerful
stimulus for the French, who were able to expel hostile forces from Champagne within a
decade.
The works of art and architecture produced in Reims between the 9th and the 13th
centuries testify to the luster of its ecclesiastical institutions and their intimate
connections with royal power. During the Carolingian era, a brilliant school of
manuscript painting, flourishing at the nearby abbey of Hautvillers, produced the
incomparable Ebbo Gospels (Épernay, Bibl. mun. 1) and Utrecht Psalter. Closely allied
to the imperial scriptorium at Aix-la-Chapelle, the energetic, classically based style of the
Reims school typified the innovative retrospection of the Car-olingian renovatio. In the
realm of architecture, the nave and sections of the transept of the abbey of Saint-Remi
survive from a vast Romanesque project (1005–49) intended as a shrine for the saint’s
relics as well as a storehouse for the miraculous oil delivered for the baptism of Clovis
and used in royal unctions. Its T-shaped basilican plan may recall St. Peter’s in Rome; the
tall three-story elevation of arcade, gallery, and clerestory, originally wooden-roofed,
sounds an emphatic note of spacious verticality. An expanded choir, erected ca. 1170–90
under Abbot Peter of Celle, reflects the new Gothic style in its ground plan with a series
of contiguous radiating chapels around an ambulatory and a diaphanous four-story
elevation stayed by flying buttresses.
A fire on May 6, 1210, destroyed the cathedral of Notre-Dame, a heterogeneous
assemblage of 9th- and 12th-century campaigns. Reconstructed beginning in 1211, the
new edifice absorbed and modernized elements of Saint-Remi within the framework of a
uniform, three-story bay structure influenced by ideas from Chartres and Soissons. A
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